Local Light with International Ventures Will Be Featured at Tri-State Lookout Event for Paying Subscribers
Author Gail Buckland, lauded by the New Yorker and New York Times, will speak and lead a discussion about local journalism issues at Albert Wisner Library in Warwick at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 29.
Author and curator Gail Buckland, who will speak at the first Tri-State Lookout event for paying subscribers on Oct. 29, has been involved with local and international journalism in various ways since she was in high school in the ‘60’s, and she still is.
She recently attended a conference at Columbia School of Journalism, hosted by Dean Jelani Cobb, and in London, where speakers included Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and John Poulos, president and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, among others.
“They talked about the threat to journalism at every level, including local journalism,” Buckland said.
She will discuss their findings and ideas as they may be applied here in the realm of the Tri-State Lookout, for which she is an editorial advisory board member.
“I’d like to discuss what you, the core group of subscribers, want covered,” Buckland said.
While in high school, photos of Nazi concentration camps with piles of dead bodies informed her awareness of “what can happen when the wrong people get control,” she said. If people had seen those photos earlier, the reality of the Holacaust would have been known, but even when LIFE published the pictures, late in the war in 1945, they refrained from saying that Jews were the target of the mass killings.”
The photos piqued her interest in the power of photojournalism, to which she would return later and contribute in significant ways.
She was in high school when the Yonkers newspaper gave her a regular column to write.
“I wrote about what we teenagers cared about—diversity, sports, broadening academics,” she said. “I’m still very concerned about local journalism, because issues start locally— school boards, libraries and local politics.”
While editor of her high school newspaper, she started a young Democrats group that met in her basement and drove to rallies to hand out leaflets. She also became a debate champion, “learning how to present arguments based on evidence,” she said, which resulted in an opportunity to represent the U.S. at the Herald Tribune World Youth Forum in Europe.
“We met social and political leaders to better understand other countries,” she said, “like the Social Democrats in Scandinavia.”
There she sat down for a conversation with Olof Palme, then prime minister of Sweden. In Bonn she met with then German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
She was in a Berlin bar next to the Wall when a young man ran in, sweating and verging on hysterical.
“He had just jumped over the wall and could have been shot,” Buckland said. “It became real what people risk to live in a democracy. I realized that democracy is fragile, and journalism is essential to it.”
Buckland was admitted to her first choice college, Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. But when her parents resisted her plan to attend, she went to the University of Rochester. The photography exhibits at the nearby George Eastman House led to an “epiphany,” she said.
Photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein, providing views of the Depression, and Robert Capa’s of World War II were illuminating.
“They showed good people suffering for no fault of their own,” Buckland said.
To avoid being in the U.S. during Richard Nixon’s presidency, she went to Europe, where she delved into photography, cataloging the collection of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and then became their curator.
Writing her own books and working on big projects followed. With Harold Evans, former editor in chief of the London Sunday Times and The Times, voted “greatest living or dead journalist of all time” in the United Kingdom, she spent 12 years working on The American Century.
She explored the National Archives, presidential libraries, the Library of Congress and many other repositiories to gather 900 illustrations for The American Century, most never before seen. She recalled how the late former Secretary of State Colin Powell told her that he thought he was expert in two areas of American history – civil rights and Viet Nam, but he learned much from the photos she chose for the book and researched historical material.
Buckland also worked with former Vice President Al Gore on visuals for his PowerPoint, Academy Award winning documentary and book, An Inconvenient Truth. She also worked with Al and Tipper Gore on a book about the American family.
Buckland has written many books on history and photographic history on topics from crime and war to the Middle East. Who Shot Rock and Roll and Who Shot Sports, both published by Alfred A Knopf, were praised by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Publication of her books has been accompanied by international photo exhibits and book tours.
Meanwhile, she taught the history of photography for 40 years at The Cooper Union and held the Nobel Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence .
How did Buckland get to Warwick? A colleague at Pratt Institute suggested Warwick when she was looking to buy land. In 2009, after four years researching sustainable building, she finally built her “dream house.” Her plan is to keep it in the family for many generations to come.
Gail Buckland will be at Albert Wisner Library in Warwick at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 29. The event is for paying Tri-State Lookout subscribers. Refreshments will be served. Free.
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